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I wanted to provide you an example of a long-time client of ours and the savings we continue to drive within their self-funded medical plan.

Results for a long-time customer, from a state on the East Coast, continue to provide significant value. We have been providing Medicare Coordination services for early retirees for this state since 2007, and it continues to provide significant savings after almost 10 years. The latest projections provided the following results:

Savings in 2016

Estimated Future Savings from 2016

Total Savings Since 2007

$701,020.90

$5,042,159

$72,082,833

Since 2007 we have saved this state over $72 million dollars in health costs by shifting liability to Medicare! These savings are scalable and relative. For example, a city a tenth of the size as this state could experience over $7 million dollars in health care savings to their plans.

These are real savings and they do not negatively impact the employees in any way.

If you would like to learn more on how to offer this to your clients, or if you’re a large employer and would like to learn more, you can reach us at:

In the last post, we talked about the first secret to building a solid customer service plan and how to decide what your vision is.

Today, we’ll talk about the second secret in turning your satisfied customers into raving fans. You must know what your customers want. Knowing who your customers are will help you know better how to serve them. Demographics are really important here. An upper-class woman in her 30’s is going to have completely different expectations than a working class man in his 50’s.

There are four main areas you need to consider and plan when figuring out what your customers want:

Listen to Your Customers

Ask Your Customers Sincerely

Offer More than Just a Product/Service

Know When to Ignore Them

These are all important when deciding what your customers want out of their shopping experience.

Listen to Your Customers

You need to listen to both what they say and what they don’t say. Customers may say they want one thing and really mean something else. For example, if your customers are begging for lower prices, you may find out their real priority is quick delivery.

Also, listen to your “silent” customers. These are the customers don’t bother to complain because the service is so bad they’ve just given up and don’t feel like their voice matters. They feel unwanted and when a competitor shows up, they’ll be gone.

Lastly, you need to listen to customers who only reply with “fine.” These customers are similar to the “silent” customers in that they are so used to bad customer service they only give a monotone response.

Ask Your Customers Sincerely

If you aren’t sincere when you ask their opinion, they are going to see right through you. You may be thinking, “What about the customers who aren’t saying anything?” You need to ask them sincere questions that get them thinking about their experiences. Make them feel like you really care, and you should!

Offer More than Just a Product/Service

Your customers are looking for much more than a simple product or service; they are looking for an experience that makes them feel good. They gauge every step of the process with a value. When you take this into consideration and treat them like people, they will feel like they belong.

Know When to Ignore Them

You may think this goes beyond providing good customer service, but in reality you can’t give them everything and some people you will never make happy. You have to set limits and stick to them. If your vision and company don’t meet the needs of the customer, they will be best suited somewhere else.

These are the steps and tricks to figuring out what your customers want and how you can use them to work on your customer service vision and plan.

If you get stuck, try our FREE test drive and let us help you through the process.

In the last post, we talked about the first three of the 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process. Here are all seven again:

Primary Aim

Strategic Objectives

Organizational Strategy

Management Strategy

People Strategy

Marketing Strategy

Systems Strategy

These 7 areas will fine-tune your plan for the ultimate level of success. Today we are going to cover the last four.

Think of constructing your business model like planting a tree. At first, it’s so small and weak, you wonder if it will even make it through the night. But, you keep watering, fertilizing and nurturing it. Your ideas will grow the trunk and each of these strategies will extend out as the branches of your now strong tree. Finding the perfect support staff, employees, vendors/suppliers and other relationships will make your tree flourish with leaves and flowers.

Management Strategy

The way you structure your management team is not only essential to your growth, but it is essential to the happiness of your employees and, ultimately, your customers/clients. This strategy is results-oriented and doesn’t depend on the people, but the actual system that’s in place.

A management strategy is, in short, a set of standards that include goals, rules, a mission statement and other concrete things that tell your employees how to act, your management how to grow your business and your customers/clients what to expect.

These should all be in perfect alignment with your business goals.

Employee Appreciation

You need to put together a people strategy that shows your employees how you feel about their job performance and dedication to your business. They also need to understand “why” they are doing specific tasks. This helps them to personally connect to their job, which, in turn, leads to better production and a happier workplace.

There are a number of strategies you can use to keep it interested at “the office”:

Performance Incentive Programs

Contests that reward high performance

Employee of the Month

Performance/Holiday Bonuses

These are just a few of the ideas you can use. One of the best ways to appreciate your employees is by calling a meeting and asking them how they would like to be rewarded. Think about it for a while and put the best strategy into play. Keep it fresh and change up the strategy you use from time to time to keep your employees guessing. Once they get used to the prize, it’s time for a whole new approach.

You need to build a community within your company. There needs to be support, appreciation and respect. The more “at home” an employee feels, the better they will perform and the higher their level of loyalty.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing is, of course, essential to the success of any business, but it also must work cohesively with the other strategies you’re using. There are two major pillars of a successful marketing strategy – the psychographic and demographic profiles of your customers.

The psychographic tells you what your customers are the most likely to buy and the demographic tells you who they are, which can help you learn why they buy specific items. Without this information, it simply doesn’t matter how good your business prototype is.

Systems Strategy

There are three types of systems in every business:

Hard Systems

Soft Systems

Information Systems

Hard systems refer to an inanimate system or systems that have no “life.” Soft systems are those that could be living. Information system,s which are, of course, everything else, including customer data, product information, financial… anything with data and numbers.

The most important of all three systems is the soft systems because it includes the sales systems your business uses. In your sales system, the two keys to success are: structure and substance. Structure being what you sell and substance being how you sell it.

All three systems are essential to the success of your business and while they all have their own very specific roles, they all must work together to get the job done. This also goes for your entire business development program.

I want to take a moment to recap on the ideas we went over through the business develop lessons.

An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:

Desire

Some capital

Projected a targeted profit

There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:

We can help you work through all of these areas and give your business a jumpstart that puts you ahead of your competition right from the start. Use our FREE test drive and work with one of our coaches, plus gain access to a wealth of tools and resources.

Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects into customers and retain them for marketing to in the future. While your marketing is doing its job, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting

Informative

Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dread buyer’s remorse. You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.

However, this can still occur. There are two ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund their money – no questions asked.

Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product.

These offers alone will also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more just for offering these things.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.

Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.

Offer a referral incentive.

Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.

Offer package deals.

Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.

Offer extra incentives (i.e. longer warranties) and free bonuses if ordered by a set date.

Offer financing options, if applicable.

Offer a bonus if they pay in full.

Offer special packaging or delivery.

Offer “name your own price” incentives.

Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.

Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.

Offer additional educational information to help them make the decision.

The options really are as limitless as you make them. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service and target market. Remember this…

“By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.” – Jay Abraham

Today I’d like to chat about the different types of support staff you need and what makes them so important.

There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:

The Technician

The Manager

The Entrepreneur

All of these roles need to be played simultaneously by different people with the right talents. It’s all about balance.

The Technician

This person represents the present and all that needs to be done for the physical aspects of the business building process. They are the “doer”. This is usually the most visible person of the entire operation.

The Manager

This person represents the past and works to fix problems through learning from past mistakes. They are the practical side of the business and is in charge of putting together the business and overseeing the planning.

The Entrepreneur

This person represents the future and the vision for the business. They are responsible for the creative side of the business and are always considering ways to enhance products/service, business image, branding and more.

All three of these characters are essential in the success of any business and to build a solid foundation from the start, you need to work harder to find the right people to put in these roles. Obviously, you need to be one of these key people, but ensure you find the role that fits your skills and talents, not necessarily what you THINK you should be doing.

This may be a hard process for you as you will need to relinquish some control over the business and instill trust in people to allow them to do their jobs.

Remember, our business strategist can help you through this entire process and teach you how to avoid falling victim to e-myths when you try our FREE test drive.

It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors and those around you can bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.

The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a whole host of opportunities you didn’t realize were there.

Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.

Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:

Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.

Put the generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.

Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan, this will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.

Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:

Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an incentive plan that entices them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.

Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Use our FREE test drive to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together for maximum results.

Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too!

Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.

Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.

Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

Quality product/service

Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer

Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive (click here)can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay offer many-fold.

Today you’ll learn how to use direct mail marketing and, yes, telemarketing to your full advantage. I know, the word “telemarketing” might as well be four letters, but there is a way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!

With the success direct mail marketing has had and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your success. Telemarketing is best for high priced, high margin products/services.

Here are the key steps to putting together a highly effective direct mail marketing program:

List all benefits customers will get from the purchase of your products and services.

Pick the single most powerful benefit out of that list.

Build an attention-getting headline around that benefit. Remember to use emotion-fulfill the desire to be young, wealthy, desired, popular or successful.

Develop a sales letter using the headline you created to grab attention, provide information and motivate customers to act.

Put together supplementary items, such as a brochure, order form, reply envelope or note that encourages them to read the letter.

Rent or purchase a mailing list.

Compare cost of mailing vs. cost per order.

Continue to test and refine your direct mail marketing plan.

You can see how direct mail marketing can help you find a local or even country-wide target market to send letters or postcards to and draw in new clientele and customers. Fine-tuning your marketing campaign will bring better results and therefore lower the overall cost of the campaign.

To be successful in telemarketing you need to:

Put together a plan, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the call.

Develop a list of topics to discuss and the questions you want to present around these topics.

Input verbiage checking to see if you are calling at a good time.

Include enough questions to keep the conversation interesting, but not too many to sound like you are interrogating.

Start with broad questions and narrow your focus as the conversation continues.

Offer feedback to show them you are paying attention and appreciate their time.

Don’t insult their intelligence or manipulate them.

Listen first, talk second.

Be relaxed and conversational.

Telemarketing doesn’t have to be the trauma it’s made out to be. You can put together an honest, personal and effective telemarketing campaign that is endearing, informative and gets the job done. Think of how you would want to be treated on a marketing call. Ask your friends and family what they hate most about the telemarketing calls they get and work hard to craft your plan in a better way.

“When selling by telephone, you have approximately thirty seconds to convince the customer to listen to you. You need an opening statement that captures their attention, conveys who you are, what you want and why the prospect should listen.” Jay Abraham

It’s easy to see how direct mail marketing and telemarketing can positively affect your business by bringing in new customers and increasing the level of awareness about your products, services and company branding. Our FREE test drive click here offers the resources and tools you need to work through these processes and put together the best marketing plan you can.

Business owners get locked into specific patterns of behavior that produce specific results. Unfortunately, these aren’t the results the business owner was looking for… since those results tend to be a lack of revenue and profits for their business.

The main problem is the unproductive behavioral patterns the business owner uses daily. They have become ingrained into their subconscious mind as habit patterns. These habits must be changed, and they must be changed on a subconscious level so the business owner replaces the old unproductive habits with new productive ones. But is this really possible?

Here’s how the sequence works, like it or not. Your thoughts produce specific beliefs. Those beliefs produce specific actions, and those actions produce specific results. If you aren’t getting the results you want, then you MUST change your thoughts and beliefs so that you begin to take different actions… and taking those actions over a period of time create habits.

What and why do you need to know this…

Is the mentality of the small business owner any different?

Small business owners have been mentally conditioned to behave a certain way. They have specific beliefs… such as “in order to make more money, I have to work harder. “Money is the root of all evil.” “No pain, no gain.” “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “If I don’t do it myself, it will never get done.”

Their belief leads to a specific action which is to work more hours and put forth more effort in a vain attempt to increase revenue and profits. That leads to specific results which are feelings of overwhelm, anxiety and frustration… that more and more effort is required, even though results don’t seem to appear… and in most cases, diminish.

Business owners don’t have a clue how to remove the mental barriers that are sabotaging their success. They need to get laser-focused on their highest income-producing activities, and learn how to hire, assign, delegate or barter their non-income-producing and less productive tasks.

What if you could do the same thing?

What if you could discover a proven and tested process that could double your revenue?

What if you could remove the mental barriers that may be sabotaging your success?

What if you could get laser-focused on your highest income-producing activities?

How can you learn to develop these critical skills that can revolutionize your business?

You can develop them quickly and easily through our E-Learning Marketing System™ Business Growth Coaching Program. We would be honored to share our expertise with you as a demonstration of our exceptional abilities in this area.

The following audio recording will help you learn the techniques a business owner can use to change the way they think about their business… and do it in such a way that you begin to see dramatic changes in your patterns of behavior. Let us show you how we help small business owners learn the secrets to increasing their revenue by “16X.”

To take a Test Drive on our system visit http://Profitenhancementacademy.com/myguidedtour

To your success,

Stacey Sagues & Philip Lewis

P.S. Please remember that at any time you feel ready and qualified to move forward and acquire the professional help that can enable you to build the business of your dreams, just visit click here and check out our E-Learning Marketing System™. It’s helping small business owners just like you get the answers and the help they need to build the business they have always wanted.

We created the E-Learning Marketing System™ with the perfect combination of online resources, tools and support to get you out of any financial distress you’re presently experiencing… help you get laser-focused on your highest income-producing activities… and help you develop and then apply the fundamentals that build multimillion dollar businesses. click here to see for yourself.

Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects into customers and retain them for future marketing to. While, your marketing is doing its job, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting

Informative

Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dread buyer’s remorse. You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.

However, this can still occur. There are two ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money-no questions asked

Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more, just for offering these things.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.

Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.

Offer a referral incentive.

Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.

Offer package deals.

Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.

Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date.

Offer financing options, if applicable.

Offer a bonus if they pay in full.

Offer special packaging or delivery.

Offer “name your own price” incentives.

Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.

Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.

Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options really are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service and target market. Remember this…

“By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.” Jay Abraham